Recall the birthday. Not the idea of it — the specific one, the one with the folding table in the yard.

Note the aspect ratio. Note that the colour has the particular thinness of consumer video from that decade, the reds blooming past their edges. Note that you are in the frame.

You did not see any of that. You were four. You were somewhere behind your own eyes at a height of ninety centimetres, and the light was not thin, and there was no frame, and you were not in it.

The tape was played back annually until it replaced the afternoon. It did not corrupt the memory. It is the memory. There is nothing underneath it that the tape is a recording of — the underneath was overwritten in ordinary use, the way a cassette is overwritten, and nobody was preserving the original because nobody knew it was one.

Everyone who tells you the past is gone means it romantically. Mean it technically instead. It is gone the way a buffer is gone.